Havenfall

by Sara Holland

  My heart lurches, and before I can think, I’m running down the stairs, through the entrance hall. There are guards at the front door, two of Sal’s guys who look at me with concern, but I wave them off and they let me go. How did Taya get past them? The Byrnisian dagger and Fiorden revolver that I carry now at Graylin’s request bounce awkwardly against my hip.

  The grounds are damp from all the Silver Prince’s manufactured storms during the last few days, fog clinging to the ground and shrouding the distant mountains; but the night is clear and the stars shine overhead. I get out onto the lawn just in time to see Taya vanish into the woods. Knowing that the guards are probably watching me, I make myself walk, not run, after her.

  Once I’m among the trees, the night noises billow up around me, much louder than on the lawn. Frogs, crickets, owls, wind in the pines. Somewhere far off, there’s a plaintive howl, a howl that might be a dog, a coyote, a wolf even.

  I stop just past the tree line, not wanting to go farther in without knowing where Taya is, or to yell and advertise my location to whatever else is lurking in the woods. I stand very still, hold my breath and listen for any noise that doesn’t belong to a night on the mountain.

  Then I hear it. A sound that is now burned into my memory forever. The metallic, rhythmic thump and whoosh of a shovel and dirt.

  What the hell?

  My eyes adjust to the dark as I start walking again, trying to be careful where I put my feet, to be as silent as I can. I recognize this spot, I realize with a sinking feeling. I’m nearing the same place where Graylin and I went my first night here. Just like then, the forest noises die down in the clearing, like even the bugs and frogs and owls know that something is deeply wrong.

  Taya. Taya is standing in the clearing, shovel in her hands. Even though it’s obvious what she’s doing, it still takes a second for my brain to put it together. To process. A pile of soil beside her and the shovel flashing in the weak moonlight.

  Just like when I found her in the library last night, part of me wants to walk away. Leave and pretend I never saw anything at all, that nothing has to change between us.

  But I can’t. Because she’s digging up the Solarian.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. It’s only a whisper, but it cuts through the air in the silent clearing. Taya stops, her head snapping up. There’s dirt and mud on her face and in her hair.

  She doesn’t move, doesn’t even blink when I walk up. Not until I grab the shovel and pull it from her, my hands shaking; then her hands fall and she takes a step back from me. She’s shaking too, and I don’t know if it’s from cold or fear or something else entirely.

  I give voice to the only thought my mind has room for. “What the actual hell, Taya?” I keep my eyes on her pretty face, avoiding looking into the hole in the earth she’s created. Not wanting to see how deep it goes, or what might have been uncovered.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and her voice sounds too loud in the still night—high and trembling. “I had to check something.”

  “Check what?” Horror is crawling over me like a second skin made of ice, the cold seeping through my veins and into my heart. “How did you know where we buried the Solarian?”

  I drop the shovel and take her arm. Pull her back and away from the grave, toward a sideways log at the edge of the clearing. I sit, pulling her down beside me. Even through the thick material of her bomber jacket, I can feel her shaking.

  “I didn’t find the grave,” she says, the words broken up by ragged breaths. “Max did. He told the staff about it and that’s when he was attacked.”

  Cold drops down my spine. “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t think the Solarian attacked him,” Taya says. I’m still trying not to look at the open grave, but Taya can’t seem to tear her eyes away, and it’s hard not to follow her gaze. When I do, just for a moment, I catch a glimpse of dull orange scales and my insides heave, the world lurching around me.

  Max is awake now, Graylin told me earlier. He won’t talk about what happened to him, no matter how Graylin tries to draw him out, but his soul hasn’t been stolen.

  “Look,” Taya says. She holds something in her lap—a dagger as long as her forearm, finely made, but coated in mud and old bloodstains. My head spins. I feel sick as Taya rubs at a spot of dirt on the hilt with her thumb, exposing an unfamiliar sigil. A five-petaled flower wrought in gold.

  “It’s Bram’s knife,” she says, after a moment of silence. “Not the Prince’s.”

  I look between the knife and her face. She looks terrified and like she hasn’t slept in days, but I can’t read much beyond that, her brown irises turned black by the moon. “I don’t get it,” I whisper. “So what? Why did you dig up the body?”

  “The Silver Prince was wrong about Brekken, wasn’t he? What if he’s wrong about other stuff too, like what he saw the night the doorway opened? Or what if he’s lying?” Taya’s eyes burn. “Maddie, I don’t think a Solarian in the woods is the real danger here.” She raises a hand and points back toward the inn, where we can just see the lights of its windows through the trees. “I think it’s in there.”

  “You can’t be serious.” I want to laugh—I would, except for the grim expression on Taya’s face. “I’m pretty sure the Silver Prince is the only thing between us and total chaos.”

  “Max went white when the Prince visited the infirmary.” Taya’s words are dark. “I saw it. The kid was terrified of him.”

  I feel like the ground is pitching beneath my feet, the way the earth heaved when the Fiordens flooded back into their world. “He’s a scary guy, okay. He has strong magic, that’s not a reason to hate him.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” Taya hisses. “I’m saying don’t trust him, for God’s sake. Do I have to spell it out for you what happened to Max?” She points an accusing finger toward the fresh-turned grave. “No one else knew about this body except you and Graylin and the Prince. And I can’t see Graylin ordering an attack on a kid.”

  “If you want to say something, just say it.” I don’t have time for this. I only came out here to keep her safe, and now it feels like she’s shitting on every action and choice I’ve made as Innkeeper.

  “Fine.” Taya takes a deep breath, sets her jaw. “I think the Prince opened the door to Solaria. I think he found a beast somewhere else, or lured it through, and he’s using that threat as a distraction while he takes over the inn.”

  Genuine shock jolts through me. I almost laugh, thinking she’s joking. But her eyes are round, her face dead serious. “And the Solarian is just, what?” I ask incredulously. “An innocent victim?”

  I hear Taya’s teeth grit together. “Maybe …?” She nods in the direction of the inn. “How long did Solarians live there in peace with everyone else before everything went to hell? Maybe they’re not really monsters. Maybe they fight back when someone threatens them, like, oh, everyone else in the world.”

  Somehow, though I don’t remember deciding to stand, I’m on my feet, my nails cutting painful half moons into my clenched fists.

  Nate was never a threat.

  “You’re wrong,” I say, hearing my voice come out quiet and cold. “Or you’re lying.”

  She stands up too, eyes narrow. “I’m just trying to help,” she says, articulating each word like a razor blade. “Seeing as you don’t exactly have everything under control as it is.”

  Fury shoots through me. “Leave, then,” I say. “I’m trying my best, but if that isn’t enough, I don’t know what to tell you.” I almost tear off the crystal bracelet the Silver Prince gave me, the charm that lets me cross the gravity barrier, and snap it in two. I shove one half toward her. “Take this and you can go home if you want. At least then I won’t have to follow you around and make sure you don’t get yourself killed.”

  She takes the broken bracelet but not the bait. “You could leave too,” she says softly. “Leave right now, with me. We can figure it out—”

  I make my voice as icy as
I can. “Not in a million years. This is my home. If you want to go, go.”

  Taya’s face goes white, her mouth flat.

  “Maybe I will,” she says, and turns and walks from the clearing.

  18

  After a few hours of restless sleep, I give up and let my feet take me where they want—to the Heiress’s room.

  The inside of my head is an obstacle course, full of things that I don’t want to think about and yet can’t avoid, each collision a fresh jolt of pain. Brekken’s disappearance, the fight with Taya, what she said about Max. The silver trade and the fact that Marcus is still unconscious, or the Silver Prince’s claim that Marcus made a deal with a Solarian and invited it into our home the day Nate died and Mom’s and my lives fell apart. Whatever the Heiress knows about all this, I need to know too. Maybe it has something to do with the HOSTS list?

  When the Heiress’s door opens under my knock, she doesn’t seem surprised to see me. She stands back to let me pass, and I crash into one of her fluffy armchairs, pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them.

  Images flash through my mind: the crowd and the chaos in the tunnels, the bright glimpse of Fiordenkill and the shudder of magic as the delegates scrambled through, the Silver Prince standing in Marcus’s room and telling me to make a choice. And Taya turning her back on me, the mud and moonlight in her hair as she walked away. It feels like there’s something sitting on my chest, getting heavier and heavier every minute, making it hard to move.

  The Heiress lets me be for a while, puttering around the room and putting away her silver trinkets, tucking them in cabinets and shutting them in drawers.

  “I heard what happened in the tunnels,” she says, looking sidelong toward me as she lines up rings in a velvet-lined box. Her face and voice are carefully neutral. “I felt the disturbance. The … unbalance.”

  My face burns with the memory of it. How I stood paralyzed and watched the Silver Prince fix the problem I couldn’t.

  “A third of the Fiordenkill delegates are gone. I—”

  My voice breaks, and I put my head down on my knees, not really wanting to share this with the Heiress, but needing to tell someone. “Marcus would have never let this happen.”

  Even as the words escape, though, the question of guilt twists my insides again. Can I still look up to Marcus, if what the Silver Prince said is true? If my brother is dead partly because of him?

  Partly because of me too.

  The Heiress comes over and lowers herself into the chair across from me. “Marcus isn’t here,” she says, gentleness and sternness playing tug-of-war with her words. “When he wakes, maybe he can explain everything to us. All the choices he’s made. But until then, we must make choices of our own as we see fit.”

  I hear what she’s saying to me. There’s no use wallowing. Get up and face the music. And she’s right. But I can’t. I feel like the weight of four worlds is pressing in on me from all directions, trapping me here in this chair, motionless, useless.

  The ledger, the one I know carries my mother’s name, sits on the polished desk. I nod toward it. “Marcus’s records say my mother was a host,” I say, trying to stop my voice from shaking. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.” A silver chain still sits draped over a molded porcelain hand on a side table, and she plucks it up, drawing it meditatively through her fingers. “I know she held magical objects for Marcus. Bought and sold them. But ‘host’ does seem an odd word to use, doesn’t it.” She lifts her eyes to mine. “Have you spoken to your mother about this?”

  I shake my head. The thought did cross my mind. It’s Wednesday, visiting day at Sterling Correctional Facility. I could take Marcus’s jeep and be there in a few hours. But I can’t leave Havenfall in so much chaos, and more than that, the idea of facing my mother’s dead eyes on top of everything else right now feels unbearable. I used to love her mismatched eyes. I wished I had one green one like her, instead of two plain brown ones.

  I ask the Heiress, “Do you think she was in on whatever Marcus was doing?”

  The Heiress shakes her head, eyes sad. “I couldn’t say.”

  “The Silver Prince told me my uncle was making deals with Solarians.” The words rush out of me. “He said Marcus invited one into our house. The one that killed Nathan.”

  “No one knew how dangerous they were back then,” the Heiress says gently, and I think of Taya last night, questioning if they were dangerous at all. “For centuries they attended the summit with the rest of us. You can still visit the abandoned wing and see proof of that. If Marcus had sympathy for them, he wasn’t the only one.” She sighs. “But then things changed. As they always do. Even then, Marcus still thought they were like us. He believed they were misunderstood and should be saved, not banished. But as Innkeeper, it was his job to be neutral … at least in public.”

  “It just seems so hard to believe.” I rub my eyes—I don’t have any tears left to cry, but they still ache somehow. “And that doesn’t explain why she and Marcus never told me about any of this, afterward.”

  “They may have felt guilty,” the Heiress says. “Or perhaps they felt it would put you in danger if you knew. I don’t agree with everything your uncle has done, Maddie, but I know he loves you. Your mother too.”

  But the words feel hollow when they land in my chest. I want to believe the Heiress, but I can’t. With so much chaos and blood around us, I can’t give my family a free pass. I cast around for a change of subject.

  “The book you’re writing,” I say finally. “Is it really a history of Havenfall?”

  The Heiress laughs softly and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No, that is not my book to write. Maybe it will be yours, someday.”

  “Then what are you working on? When you’ve had all those people up here for interviews?”

  “Magic.” The Heiress lets the silver chain slip through her fingers and pool in her palm. “I want to know the nature of it, how it manifests across the worlds. Fiordens have their healing and natural gifts; Byrnisians have control over the elements; Solarians have their shapeshifting. Some of that magic has been bound up in these objects.”

  She leans forward and lets the necklace fall, a slipstream of silver between her fingers. She catches it at the last moment and leans back. “But I don’t know how. All these objects—they’ve been at Havenfall for as long as anyone can remember, or Marcus or I have brought them back from elsewhere. I don’t know how they’re created. I’ve never seen one made. I believe there must have been a people, from one of the worlds now closed off, who had the power to bind magic to matter. But I don’t know which one.”

  I think of the tunnel, the dozens of dead doorways, dark portals leading nowhere. “How will you ever find out, if the people are gone?”

  Her eyes flit back and forth between me and the necklace. “I don’t know if I will. History, even the history I was there to witness, slides quickly out of my grasp when there is no one else to remember it with me. And now I’m trying to write about something I haven’t even seen; everything I know comes to me secondhand.”

  She smiles, though it’s more sad and tired than genuine. “Things would be much easier if your Brekken were still here, you know. He was supposed to be making the trades while I stayed here and did the research. Now I have to go down into town tomorrow and deal with that dreadful man …”

  My Brekken. The words sink into my heart like a fishhook and tug. I know now that he was fighting a good fight. Working with the Heiress to bring the magical objects safely back to the inn. But the hurt of my stolen keys is still raw, tangled up with my shock and disbelief that Marcus would allow the black market to fester. And I don’t know if I’ll ever even see Brekken again. In the roller coaster of the last few days, that hasn’t really sunk in—but now it hits me, all at once. He’s my best friend. I love him, and he’s gone.

  I push the thoughts away before I can go too far down that road.

  “What time are you going to the antique sho
p?” I ask her, trying to steer us away from topics of Brekken and leaving and guilt and regret, back toward practical, safe ground. “I can get you some security—”

  But a knock at the door cuts me off before I can finish the thought. The Heiress snaps to full alertness, her head turning in the direction of the door, her spine going army-straight. She catches my eye and points to the wardrobe in the corner.

  I stare at her questioningly. Even with the curfew, there’s no rule saying people can’t visit each other’s rooms. But as she makes a stabbing motion for emphasis, something inside tells me not to argue.

  I stand quietly, pad over, and slip into a world of perfumed fur, silk, and velvet just as another knock comes and a man’s voice sounds.

  “Lady Heiress?”

  I reach out and pull the wardrobe mostly shut just as the Heiress goes to the door and opens it.

  “Lady Heiress.”

  I don’t recognize the voice, but the man’s accent is Oasis. One of the Byrnisian delegates, maybe.

  “The Silver Prince asked me to tell everyone of importance that the Solarian beast has been captured.”

  I suck in my breath without meaning to, the Heiress’s floral perfume that clings to her coats scratching my throat. But I guess the messenger doesn’t hear me, because he keeps talking.

  “Everyone is invited to come view the beast in the ballroom, if they wish.”

  “It lives still?”

  Even from here I can hear the skepticism in the Heiress’s voice.

  “The Prince is deliberating with his advisors on what to do next. He plans to interrogate the beast.”

  “Then I wish him the best in that endeavor,” the Heiress says, crisp and cool.

  The door shuts. I hear her footsteps tread close, and then the wardrobe opens, blinding me for a second.

  “Well?” she asks me as I stand there amidst her coats, a sneeze caught in my lungs and my heart beating fast with mixed relief and terror. “I suppose you’ll want to go see this beast?”